High Reliability Organizing in High Risk Industries Banner - Artwork by E. Steele, for the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center

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Feb 26, 2009:
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Karlene Roberts

The High Reliability Organization

Karlene Roberts, PhDThe organization constantly evaluates itself for unexpected problems that can lead to safety faults much like continuous quality management systems that evaluate for threats to quality.  The HRO system easily overlaps into quality as both safety faults and quality defects result from error, it is basically whether error affects a person, product, or process.  Process auditing permits HROs to identify weaknesses in their systems.

Performance can drift over time, particularly during a protracted period of successes, and a HRO’s quality may degrade or become inferior.  Also, growth in performance can become level if the organization uses only itself as the quality and safety referent.  An HRO compares itself to other organizations, initially this may be a successful organization in the same field but, with time and the development of expertise, the organization begins to compare itself to other, and quite different, HROs.

Reward systems, while straightforward, can become nuanced and produce unexpected results.  Requiring a full and documented response to an event may lead to the team’s focus on paper keeping engaging in “euboxia,” a mindset identified by van Stralen in the early 1990s as “all the boxes are filled out, we must have done right.” 

Risk must be recognized and perceived to be acted upon.  HROs recognize that the hidden, latent, or missed risk may be most dangerous and that the most dangerous risks may be the most attractive.

Command and Control, a concept adapted from the military, refers to the ability of an organization to both lead and command staff and maintain control during a crisis or to begin the control of the environment during a crisis. 

 

Karlene Roberts is a lecturer and full professor at Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley,
a Research Psychologist at the Institute of Industrial Relations and is an Associate Director, at the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management. She has visiting appointments at: Graduate School of Management, University of California, Irvine and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Current Research and Interests: The design and management of organizations and systems of organizations in which errors can have catastrophic consequences. The results of this research have been applied to U.S. Navy aircraft carrier operations, the U.S. Coast Guard, The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), The Federal Aviation’s Air Traffic Control System, Gard Services, British Petroleum, NASA, and the medical industry. Currently working with incident management teams in the U.S. and France on an international project interested in improving reliability in the high risk environments of wildland fire.